Elysium

Review

A desolate third world wasteland. A gated, auspicious, white people paradise. Slave sweatshop. Tea and martinis. Not all that implausible, but Elysium represents the ultimate gated community, while the third world has become the entire earth.

This fundamental class distinction leads to inevitable class conflict in Neil Blomkamp’s follow up to District 9, a similarly weighty sci-fi film. Both films take on issues of global significance, particularly immigration, apartheid and capitalist exploitation of the underclass. Blomkamp strikes a blow for the rest of humanity, and Elysium is a very good film, bordering on greatness. For an action sci-fi thriller, it delivers the battles, the archetypes and the desperation of the world. I heartily recommend seeing it.

Full Critique With Spoilers
 
mail4joeg said:
Review

A desolate third world wasteland. A gated, auspicious, white people paradise. Slave sweatshop. Tea and martinis. Not all that implausible, but Elysium represents the ultimate gated community, while the third world has become the entire earth.

This fundamental class distinction leads to inevitable class conflict in Neil Blomkamp’s follow up to District 9, a similarly weighty sci-fi film. Both films take on issues of global significance, particularly immigration, apartheid and capitalist exploitation of the underclass. Blomkamp strikes a blow for the rest of humanity, and Elysium is a very good film, bordering on greatness. For an action sci-fi thriller, it delivers the battles, the archetypes and the desperation of the world. I heartily recommend seeing it.

Full Critique With Spoilers
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I'd like to see Blomkamp tackle the joys of Communism. It would be a stretch for him, but stepping outside your comfort zone can produce remarkable results.
 
Watch it guys. Threads have been closed over these kinds of comments. Hard to avoid some political discussion because of the nature of the film but this could easily get out of hand.
 
I'd like to know how many moviegoers in the US can recognize this flag, and during an action sequence on top of that.
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^^ My wife noticed it.

Really enjoyed this one. There's been a lot of political controversy surrounding this one and I tried to ignore all that and go in with a clear mind.

**SPOILERS***
It's dark, intense, uncomfortable (i don't think there's one scene where Max isn't in some kind of pain or distress) It's a lot of misery, but a nice payoff at the end. Overall plenty of great action scenes, wonderful CGI and some cool gore if you're into that sort of thing. The shots of ships flying to and fro from Elysium were fantastic. Shartlo Copley just nails it as the villain.

and +++++ points for being relatively SHORT. I think we were out of the theatre in less than 2 hours. Really getting sick of these long, windy films that could be pared down.

Negative points for extreme shaky cam in certain scenes. I have no problem with a nice organic camera off sticks, but when you see these jarring, deliberately shaky hand held shots on a huge screen, it's nauseating. (well, not that bad, but pretty bad)

I could discuss plenty of plot holes and improbabilities, but WTF, it's a summer movie. Go have some fun.
 
""Elysium" came out in an identical frame as "District 9," the second weekend in August and against three other wide releases. Yet its numbers were down nearly 20%. "
http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...mn-matt-damon-elysium-20130812,0,788562.story


"Depending on how it performs in the weeks ahead (and overseas), the new film, which cost $115 million for Media Rights Capital to make and tens of millions more for Sony to market, may or may not come out in the black."


Some are saying it's the "rich people are evil" theme that doesn't resonate with movie goers, and that could be part of it for some but for whatever reason this one doesn't seem like it's going to be a money maker.

Is it just a function of budget? The article above mentions that for this size budget you need to make about 150 million at the box office to be successful, and several movies have reached that mark this Summer.

In Time is another movie that has the "rich people are evil" theme and it did well at the box office, but only because it had a 40 million dollar budget, less than half of Elysium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time#Box_office_performance




 
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Here's my random thoughts on it.

- Matt Damon was excellent, Jodie Foster was not.
- As expected, excellent vfx and design. Lots of cool little things throughout.
- bad bounty hunters dialogue was poor.

The movie didn't really connect with me, might be my cold heart though. All up I enjoyed it though.

3.25/5
 
I don't know what to say about this film, beyond the fact that it was a total disappointment. Overwrought storytelling. Heavy-handed direction. Unintentionally funny acting. This felt very much like an exercise in technical filmmaking.
 
Agree with you there Stephen, except I still didn't mind the movie.

I assume you're talking about Jodie Foster being unintentionally funny? It was so bad it felt like it was ADR too, just... weird. The baddy sounded funny sometimes too.

I thought the themes in the story were pretty heavy-handed too.
 
tmnt said:
the baddy sounded funny sometimes too.
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The 'baddy' if Sharlto Copey is who you are referring to, was speaking in an Afrikaans/English 'accent'. No more 'funny' than the many 'baddy' English idioms used, but perhaps almost unheared outside of South Africa... well... there was "Lethal Weapon 2"(1989) but some say the accents affected were as bad as Dick van Dyke's "Cockney" for "Mary Poppins"(1964)...
 
I didn't mind Sharlto at all. I love that guy. I just wish Blomkamp had made some small effort to give his character some dimension. I mean seriously, how "bad" does the bad guy have to be for us to get how bad he is?

But Jodie Foster's performance was comical and embarrassing. Now, she wasn't given much more than Copley to work with, but still, I've never seen her more hilariously overact than she does here.

And there were just so many moments of "on-the-nose" filmmaking that jumped off the screen. Like the meerkat and hippo story. Or the moment Kruger sees the broken piece of mirror and…guess what he's going to do with it?

The more I think about this movie, the dumber it is.
 
j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
The 'baddy' if Sharlto Copey is who you are referring to, was speaking in an Afrikaans/English 'accent'. No more 'funny' than the many 'baddy' English idioms used, but perhaps almost unheared outside of South Africa... well... there was "Lethal Weapon 2"(1989) but some say the accents affected were as bad as Dick van Dyke's "Cockney" for "Mary Poppins"(1964)...
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Yes I've heard that accent before. Sharlto had very crappy dialogue to work with and I didn't like his delivery half the time too but that's I think 95% the directors fault. Every time he dropped an Fbombs I rolled my eyes a bit.
 
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j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
The 'baddy' if Sharlto Copey is who you are referring to, was speaking in an Afrikaans/English 'accent'. No more 'funny' than the many 'baddy' English idioms used, but perhaps almost unheared outside of South Africa... well... there was "Lethal Weapon 2"(1989) but some say the accents affected were as bad as Dick van Dyke's "Cockney" for "Mary Poppins"(1964)...
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Afrikaans

 
Just got back from the cinema after seeing this film.

In short, I think it started well, the visuals looked great and I really liked how the film portrayed the contrast between the standard of living on earth compared to Elysium. However, the film really took a nose dive from the final third and just seemed rushed and contrived from then onwards.

Things that bothered me:

Actor's performances; Jodie Foster was completely unconvincing; totally miscast for the role. Matt Damon was rather mediocre...his character didn't really portray much emotion and I just didn't feel much empathy for his cause. By the end of the film, his sacrifice didn't seem particularly significant on an emotional level.

I'm sorry but I felt that the depiction of mostly whites living in luxury on a space station at the expense of hispanics living in poverty on earth was unjustified and unnecessary. I'm sure Neill Blomkamp wanted to draw some sort of parallel between the film and the relationship between the United Stated and Mexico, but this just doesn't cut it for me. What's really concerning is how subtle it is, almost in a way in which you don't notice it. It's no wonder that people have negatively stereotypes of ethnic minorities in our society, this film reinforces this. Anyway, not too get too political...

This film had the potential to be awesome but really fell flat. Overall, disappointing.
 
I found this film disappointing overall too. The trailer caught my eye originally due to the nice visuals and interesting casting of Damon in a sci-fi lead (with all that cool exoskelie costuming). But, plot-wise, the film itself never really elevated itself to the scale of the worlds suggested by those visuals. *Spoilers alert* It came down in the end to a 'fortress' world that just seemed far too easy to break into (repeatedly), a pretty formulaic wham-bam stand-off between main baddie and goodie and a heavy-handed subplot featuring a sick child denied access to a med-bed. The juxtaposition of have and have-not worlds remains a compelling idea but was just not sufficiently explored here.

While I wasn't expecting Damon's character to morph into Iron Man and have superhero abilities, I did wonder if they couldn't have done something just a little more interesting (something less mundane) with the exoskeleton clad lead. And I agree with the previous post. Jodie Foster, who to my mind is a fantastic actress and consistently so, just didn't work in this part. Miscast? Has to have been. Because how can you not get a performance outta Jodie Foster?

It may just be me though, getting cranky in my (relative) old age. I overheard two guys in their early twenties discussing this film recently and they positively raved about it. I'm so not in the demographic anymore...
 
norvan5 said:
It may just be me though, getting cranky in my (relative) old age. I overheard two guys in their early twenties discussing this film recently and they positively raved about it. I'm so not in the demographic anymore...
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Don't know that I'd break out in a 9th Symphony style choral of praise for Elysium, but I was entertained... which is mostly all I'm looking for these days...
 
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